By building efficient critical processes, Wipro helped a leading financial institution reconcile with its customers faster.
Client Background
The client is a leading global financial institution operating in three global divisions - private banking, investment banking and asset management, all supported by shared services.
Industry Landscape
The global financial crisis and the resultant meltdown brought forth several new challenges for banks and financial institutions. In the past few years, banks faced delinquencies in asset-based products, putting the spotlight back on profitability and enhancing shareholder value. Investment banks are facing a huge pressure to reduce costs and bring in greater operational efficiencies, especially in the area of global reconciliations. Verifying consistencies and helping resolve exceptions at the earliest have assumed high levels of criticality in the global banking scenario.
The Opportunity
The client’s reconciliation process across business groups was a highly complex and time consuming exercise, given the substantial manual interventions that it required. Since the bank was not using a universal reconciliation product, the level of automation and the process for auto-matching of rates varied across groups. The bank’s biggest challenge was to harmonize the processes and bring in greater efficiency related gains to the verticals.
The client sought an automated solution that could support a global recon infrastructure and help them streamline processes involving reconciled data. Other priorities of the recon service that required support included:
Solution
Wipro engaged with the bank to provide an integrated solution that covered all aspects of the reconciliation lifecycle including analysis, development, quality assurance and release. Wipro worked closely with the customer’s Recon Group to plan and deliver the solution, and followed it up with on-going support.
The partnership helped enhance the compliance levels vis-a-vis internal control measures by delivering reconciliations in the critical areas of cash, securities and other internal systems.
As more reconciliations came within the purview of the centralized recon group, Wipro’s enhanced support helped the businesses achieve higher levels of automation.
Business Impact
Wipro enabled the automation of various critical and high profile reconciliations for the bank, resulting in cost savings through increased efficiencies. Other benefits include:
Engagement Highlights
During the four-year engagement, the client’s business groups significantly increased the auto match rates to 98% by reducing the level of manual interventions. With the engagement transforming into a utility-focused model based on a pricing catalogue that leveraged a recon complexity matrix, the total cost of ownership (TCO) came down by at least 25%. This resulted in a marked increase in control efficiency of the business